ASML Holding Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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As of 2020 leading makers of the most important fab photolithography equipment.
Video 1.
ASML: TSMC's Critical Supplier by Asianometry (2021)
Source.
Video 2.
How ASML Won Lithography by Asianometry (2021)
Source.
First there were dominant Elmer and Geophysics Corporation of America dominating the market.
Then a Japanese government project managed to make Nikon and Canon Inc. catch up, and in 1989, when Ciro Santilli was born, they had 70% of the market.
youtu.be/SB8qIO6Ti_M?t=240 In 1995, ASML had reached 25% market share. Then it managed the folloging faster than the others:
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Backward design Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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This is one of Ciro Santilli's most important principles.
Steve Jobs has a great quote about this. He's totally right on this one!
You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to sell it.
Video 1.
Steve Jobs Insult Response excerpt from the 1997 WWDC
. Source. TODO understand the context of the question a bit better. It is something to do with an OpenDoc thing and Java.
Decide your goal first, and then do whatever is needed to how to reach it.
Don't start randomly learning tech, because that means you will waste a lot of time learning useless stuff.
There is of course some level chicken-and-egg paradox in this, as highlighted by Dilbert, since choosing an achievable goal in the first place requires some level of technical understanding.
Figure 1.
Dilbert cartoon about designing a nuclear power plant from user requirements (2002)
Source.
This cartoon illustrates well how when doing deep tech and fighting against the laws of physics, you can't just start from user requirements, but you also have to also think "what can we actually get done at all with this new technique".
The best research engineers are able to identify what is just on the cusp of the "possible", but which has the greatest value. This is the endless dance between the tech push, and the market/need pull.
However, it is much more common that people will get way too involved in learning useless stuff and lose sight of the useful end goals.
Rather, take an iterative approach:
There is some truth to the counter argument that "but if you don't spend a lot of time learning the basics, you can never find solutions".
However, these people underestimate your brain. The brain is beautiful, and human intuition is capable of generating interest towards the things that are actually useful to reach your goal. When you feel like learning something related to your goal, by all means, give yourself the time to do so. But this still be much more efficient than just learning random things that other people tell you to learn.
Bibliography:
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Buddhism Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli's favorite religion. He does not believe fully in it, nor has he studied it besides through brief Wikipedia and Googling.
Ciro likes Buddhism because it feels like the least "metaphysical explanations to things you can't see" of the religions he knows.
Rather, it feels more like "a plausible theory of the mind" and highly compatible with physics.
Ciro also believes that there is a positive correlation between being a software engineer and liking Buddhist-like things, see also: the correlation between software engineers and Buddhism.
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Ciro Santilli Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli is a male human software engineer and activist born in Brazil, Earth in 1989 AD.
Quick facts:
Other people with the same name are listed at Section "Ciro Santilli's homonyms".
Figure 1.
19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong
. Source.
Sun Wukong (孙悟空) is a playful and obscenely powerful monkey Journey to the West. He protects Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, and likes eating fruit, just like Ciro. Oh, and Goku from Dragon Ball is based on him. His japanese name is "Sun Wukong" (same Chinese characters with different Japanese pronunciation) for the love. His given name "Wukong" means literally "the one who mastered the void", which is clearly a Dharma name and fucking awesome in multiple ways. This is another sad instance of a Chinese thing better known in the West as Japanese.
It is worth noting however that although Wukong is extremely charming, Ciro's favorite novel of the Four Great Classic Novels is Water Margin. Journey to the West is just a Monster of the Week for kids, but Water Margin is a fight for justice saga. Sorry Wukong!
Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli playing with a pipette at the University of Cambridge circa 2017
.
The photo was taken in an open event organized by the awesome Cambridge Synthetic Biology outreach group, more or less the same people who organize: www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Synthetic-Biology-Meetup/ and who helped organize Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it".
Taking part in such activities is what Ciro tries to do to overcome his lifelong regret of not having done more experimental stuff at university. Would he have had the patience to handle all the bullshit of the physical word without going back to the informational sciences? Maybe, maybe not. But now he will probably never know?!
Notice the orange high visibility cycling jersey under the lab coat, from someone who had just ridden in from work as fast as possible as part of his "lunch break". It is more fun when it is hard.
Figure 3.
Scribe Jean Miélot, 15th century
.
Ciro Santilli fantasises that he would have make a good scribe in the middle ages, partly due to his self diagnosed graphomania, but also appreciation for foreign languages, and his mild obsession with the natural sciences.
OurBigBook.com is Ciro's view of a modern day scriptorium, except that now the illuminations are YouTube videos.
Chill and eat your bread in peace comes to mind. A scribe, in a library, reading and writing the entire day in peace and quiet. The life!
The job of a Internet-age scribe is basically that of making knowledge more open, legally extracting it from closed copyrighted sources, and explaining your understanding of it to the wider world under Creative Commons licenses on the web. And in the process of greater openess, given a well organized system, we are able combine the knowledge of many diffferent people, and thus make things more understandable than any single/few creator closed source source could ever achieve.
Ciro once saw some cartoon on Wikipedia help pages of a turtle with a book in one hand, and typing into Wikipedia on its computer, TODO find it. That cartoon summarizes well the modern scribe life.
Another analogous version of this fantasy more in touch with Ciro's sinophily is the ideal of the Chinese scholar, notably including their stereotypical attributes such as mastery of the Four arts.
Figure 4.
Ciro Santilli piling boxes as a child
. A natural born engineer.
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Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli has a bad memory for events that happened a medium time ago, for example in order of months/years. Especially if they are one-off things that have no relation to anything else.
For example, Ciro never remembers which places he travelled to just once, and who was in each trip! He has images of several places he travelled to in his head, and would recognize them, but he just doesn't know where they were!
Another example, Ciro was looking at the carpet at their house, and asked where it came from. His wife replied immeidately: from Bercy shopping quarter in Paris about 10 years ago, and you took it on your back for a long walk until we could find the bus back home because we were concerned it wouldn't fit in the train!
The same goes for scenes from movies and passages from music, which explains why Ciro's art consumption focuses on innovative discrete "what happened" and "general gist" ideas, rather than, analog details such as colors and shapes.
Going back even further in time, Ciro starts to forget the less close friends he had, because the events start to fade away.
Paradoxically however, Ciro believes that this bad memory is one of his greatest strengths and key defining characteristics, because it leads Ciro to want to write down every interesting thing he learns, which motivated OurBigBook.com and his Stack Overflow contributions and his related Ciro Santilli's documentation superpowers.
It also somewhat leads Ciro to like physics and mathematics, because in these fields you "can deduce everything" from very few base principles, so if you forget them, it does not matter that much as you can re-deduce stuff over and over. Which is somewhat where the high flying bird attitude comes from. It is hard to go deep when you have to re-prove everything every time. But the upside is that anything that sticks, does so because it has a broad net to stick to, and therefore allows Ciro to make unusual and unexpected connections that others might not.
Ciro believes that there are two types of people, and most notably software engineers, which are basically data wranglers: those with bad memory and those with good memory.
Those with bad memory, tend to focus on automating and improving their processes a lot. They take much longer to do one-off specific deep knowledge tasks however.
The downside of the good memory ones is that sooner or later they will find tasks that no matter how much memory they have, they cannot solve without automation, and they will fail at those.
Also, good memory people don't enable others to join the project efficiently as much.
This dichotomy also explains why Ciro sucks at code reviews, but is rather the person who runs the interesting patches by himself and finds some critical problems that the more theoretical code reviewers missed.
If Ciro had become a scientist, he would without doubt be an experimentalist, just like in this reality he is a GDB/runtime person rather than a "static source analysis" person. Those who have bad memory prefer to just run experiments over and over and observe system state at runtime.
Other effects of having a bad memory include:
  • code duplication, or a constant fear of it at least, because Ciro forgets that some functionality exists already
  • meeting aversion, because everything that is not recorded will fade away
  • passion for backward design, because by the time a piece of knowledge learnt in school might be useful (and 99.99% won't), it will have been long forgotten
Related: jakobschwichtenberg.com/about/ from Jakob Schwichtenberg:
I'm a physicist and I try to write down things during my own learning process.
In some sense, one of the biggest benefits I have over other people in physics is that I'm certainly not the smartest guy! I usually can't grasp complex issues very easily. So I have to break down complex ideas into smaller chunks to understand it myself. This means, whenever I describe something to others, everyone understands, because it's broken down into such simple terms.
On C2 wiki, therefore it cannot be wrong wiki.c2.com/?QuasiGreatTeacher:
Some people have learning disabilities, [... bullshit ...]. A lot of classic spiritual texts have been produced this way. Basically, the stupidest but most dogged disciple, if he has a neurotic habit of writing things down, will make the best teacher for the third and subsequent generations.
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Ciro Santilli's cycling Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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At first, Ciro Santilli was just cycling to work with an extremely shitty bike he bought on a second hand shop. He knew nothing about bicycles, and the seat was way, way too low, the seller should be prosecuted for selling that to him. Ciro later understood that this was even a woman's bicycle with a low top tube! That's what you get for being so cheap.
But then at some point he bought another slightly less cheap touring bicycle, but this time from a much more trustworthy source: a colleague who was leaving the company and moving out, and this one was actually reasonable. It was the right size to start with!!! And so at some point, out of boredom, Ciro started to adventure out of town on weekends to neighbouring villages, and it just felt so good.
Ciro had started by taking his laptop-computer on his backpack, and stopping at a cafe on some nearby town where he would do some coding over the weekends. Especially during winter, drinking tea with a cake as a break during bicycle ride was the best thing ever. In one place, there was even an electric heater that you could sit in front of. But at some point, those rides start being too short, and you start doing longer real rides without your computer. And since those take more time, you generally don't feel like staying on a far place for a very long time. So you end up creating the "real ride" category and "a small ride to get somewhere nice to code" category clearly split.
He had had the "cyclists high" version of "runner's high". A light euphoria in your head, or a pulsating feeling of pleasure in your legs and lower torso. This reminded Ciro of:
except that it is not as intense, and does not destroy your life.
Like other drugs:
  • it is addictive
  • you will have some bad trips, e.g. went the wrong way on a highway and are afraid you are going to die crushed by fast cars, got flat tire on 1 hour ride and have no repair kit, destination cafe is closed and you are hungry, wind got so strong you can barely ride, half an hour in you find out that it is way colder than what you expected.
    But for every such experience you survive, you learn something to reduce the chances it will happen, and it later feels great to completely master a situation you had suffered previously with.
    Ciro has also come to crave the need to go back to every bad trip spot, with better planning and circumstances, and make it feel amazing, to get the feeling that he has mastered the spot.
  • you will have hangover after a long amazing ride
  • the high become less intense the more you ride, and turns into something you have to do to just to feel normal. And that keeps you fit forever :)
Cycling just gives you an amazing sense of freedom! Ciro likes to imagine himself as a migratory duck when he is riding his bike on cold or wet days.
The prospect of being able to reach nice new places keeps the experience fresh for a very long time.
Ciro likes to decide location on a whim on the day prior. He checks the wind to try and ride parallel to it, and then let's his mind wonder, until an image comes up, some some nice place Ciro was to once. And so the next day, he goes in that general direction again.
Each time you try to find a new cool location, and sometimes you just stumble into amazing stuff without knowing about it. Ciro likes to keep open to new experiences. Keep your eyes open, and if something looks curious, just check it out! Talking to locals for tips is also a great way to find new stuff.
One thing that Ciro often feels is rather excited on the way out, and lightly afraid of going futher at each step because of the return. And during the return, there is a greater feeling of worry and resignation, as you are more tired, you've seen what you wanted to, and you just have to get yourself homehow, often going back through paths that you know better. This reminds Ciro of the ending of the film In the Realm of the Senses (1976), in which the sex obsessed couple plays a strangling sex game, and the man says that it hurts too much when she stops strangling him, and so she strangles him to death. She also cut his penis and carried it around in a bag afterwards, but that not relevant to the cycling analogy.
It is funny, but sometimes this gives Ciro the same feeling that he had as a child playing 2D exploration RPGs such Pokemon and Final Fantasy VI as you explore the wild: Ciro can often hear the FF VI overworld soundtrack, or imagine that a Charmeleon is hidden just around the corner of this new towns he's never been to before. Because in the places you live and have walked a million times, you know there is no magic. But in a new place that you're visiting for the first time? Anything is possible there.
The main difference from video games is that the real world is much much more detailed and diverse, and the freedom is much more real. Also you can't just walk into any house or field like in the games, and there are more empty or repetitive areas that can sometimes get boring since they weren't hand designed. And if you die on a car crash there are no continues.
Another type of game that comes to mind are survival games and roguelikes, where it feels amazing to learn things that actually mean the difference between life and death, and conquering the environment. But also permadeath.
It also gives Ciro the magic feeling of awe that he had as a child when walking around his beloved hometown of Santos, São Paulo, Brazil in the sunshine. And sometimes the feeling of excitement that he had as a child before getting gifts for Christmas. Ciro then once watched a YouTube video where ex-heroin addicts describe the feeling of taking heroin (orally, TODO can't find the video anymore, I think it was this guy) exactly like that: the anticipation of getting Christmas gifts, and he instantly understood.
Ciro also likes to pick random gravel from time to time. He believes that his style of route choice reflects Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality: Ciro likes to go where few other people go. And he only needs to go there once to be satisfied, not master and speedrun it afterwards.
Ciro avoids riding at night of course. But when it happens and you are prepared with the safety lights and the route knowledge, it makes for some of the most memorable rides of your life.
As you start cycling, you can feel the endorphins levels rise little by little, and your mind go deeper and deeper into slumber, getting close and closer to the ground, until you reach a point where you feel like you are part of the road. Trainspotting (1996)'s overdose scene comes to mind: www.youtube.com/watch?t=66&v=_IDJpB9de3E
It is amazing how you feel much less cold and hunger when cycling, to the point of being dangerous: always carry some chocolate bars in case you hit the wall! This is especially true at the beginning of the addiction, but with increased drug tolerance and knowledge/awareness/preparation, this starts to feel more normal.
As a friend of Ciro once said: you start to become like a wolf, who knows every cyclable little road in a 30km radius around your home.
As of 2020, Ciro is at that "should I buy a more reasonable road bike" moment. Let's see how it goes. If he does, cycling trips with the bike on a plane are likely.
As a software engineer, trying to repair a mechanical system like his bike reminds Ciro very strongly of how the physical engineering is brutal. Millimetric changes can make huge differences, it is mind blowing! Good lesson to have in mind.
Another thought that often comes to Ciro's mind is that bicycles are not regular possessions because they break a lot. Rather, they must be seen as a kind of transportation tax that you have to pay to feel amazing riding them rather than feel crappy riding a bus or train.
One interesting feeling that Ciro gets from cycling is that it is an intermediate between walking and riding a car. Ciro felt this especially strongly when he lived near work, at a distance that you could either walk or cycle. When you walk, you can just see so much more of the surroundings, it is astonishing. When you cycle, you just go much faster, and you attention is much more towards the front, so you feel surroundings much less. On the other side, cycling allows you to feel different things. E.g. in wider open areas, there isn't much detail to see anyway, so you can better feel those areas on the faster speed of the bike. A similar feeling applies to how pedestrians feel like flies when you are on a bike, just like you must feel like a fly to car drivers. Ciro later learnt that a person of similar literary ability to his, Ernest Hemingway, had a famous related similar quote:
It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them.... Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
Although Ciro does not run because of his itchy legs issue, he finds it interest to contrast cycling with running, notably:
  • cycling has a much higher setup time or wearing appropriate clothes, unlocking your bike, and of course, bike maintenance
  • running allows you to go into many more small paths that are not accessible by bike, thus offering a different sense of freedom. You can't go as far however.
So maybe the ultimate sport would be to cycle to a good cross-country running location and then run over there?
Ciro's natural work-time rhythm as of 2020 in his shitty Kross bicycle (2017) was a 60/70km ride every 3 days. Or a 35/40km ride every 2 days. Or one longer 100/120km ride every 4 days. Less than 35km does not count as a ride. His average speed on anything above 70km and relatively flat is always 20km. Always. Ciro once read that that one hunt every three days was a common Paleolithic practice. Cycling is obviously a substitute for hunting. Perhaps the imminent danger of being crashed by a car at all times also has the positive side of playing the "danger" part of the hunt: Video "Why football is the most popular sport in the world by Desmond Morris"
Apocryphally attributed to H. G. Wells as per Quote Investigator quoteinvestigator.com/2022/12/10/bicycle-hope/:
Every Time I See an Adult on a Bicycle, I No Longer Despair for the Future of the Human Race
Video 1.
Running Vs. Cycling | Who Is Faster - GCN Or GTN? by GCN (2017)
Source. Talks about the interesting Bingley Harriers & AC "harriers vs cyclists" race held annually in the UK, in which you can either run or cycle! The course attempts to balance rough uphill terrain where runners get an advantage, with less rough downhill where cyclists have an advantage.
Video 2.
Final Fantasy VI (SNES) Overworld theme
. Source. This is what cycling feels like!!! The song is known in the West as "Terra's Theme" and it was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, who composed the entire game, and other entries of the Final Fantasy series.
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Ciro Santilli's dreams Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli's dreams almost all include the following aspect: Ciro is trying to do something mundane, like climbing a hill, walking across town, etc. but doing so it extremely difficult. The hill is too steep, he gets lost, and things which are easy to use in real life are impossibly hard to use in the dream.
So they are a bit like nightmares, but not that bad. Just really annoying and tiresome. Still, Ciro does enjoy o visiting the semi-real places those dreams bring him to, much for the same reasons he enjoys cycling.
Ciro attributes this type of dream to his occupation as a software engineer, because that's basically the feeling you get all day from it: why isn't this working!!! It is so basic!!!
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Ciro Santilli's hardware Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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One day, someone will invent a way to take the hash of a piece of hardware and see its history log, like software engineers do with version control. Until then, this is as close as you can get.
Ciro one day guessed that hardware would certainly be a slang for something naughty, and yup, here we are: www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hardware, drug paraphernelia. Read on!
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Computer science Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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A branch of mathematics that attempts to prove stuff about computers.
Unfortunately, all software engineers already know the answer to the useful theorems though (except perhaps notably for cryptography), e.g. all programmers obviously know that iehter P != NP or that this is unprovable or some other "for all practical purposes practice P != NP", even though they don't have proof.
And 99% of their time, software engineers are not dealing with mathematically formulatable problems anyways, which is sad.
The only useful "computer science" subset every programmer ever needs to know is:
Funnily, due to the formalization of mathematics, mathematics can be seen as a branch of computer science, just like computer science can be seen as a branch of Mathematics!
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École Polytechnique Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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The "most prestigious French engineering school". Only 3 Nobels though as of 2019, the scientists are mostly at École normale supérieure (Paris). A gazillion CEOs ad politicians however.
Ciro Santilli studied there from 2010 to 2013.
Ciro considers him entering at Polytechnique a small miracle. First, on his second year of University in Brazil, he first had to fail to join the also good but not as good École centrales, which really annoyed him as he saw the "other good students" who wanted to go out get their wish. This also explains why there are so few students from his university going to Polytechnique in the late 2010's: most already went to other locations! Then, on his third year, he tried Polytechnique and got in despite feeling that the others who got in knew much more mathematics and physics than him. Rather, Ciro believes that he got in chiefly due to his intense passion for the sciences which he showed during the interview.
The miracle would have been even greater if it had happened in 2020. At this time, out of 10 Brazilians, 9 are from ITA, the "hardest to get into" university in Brazil, and also military like Polytechnique. Make no mistake, those students are amazing and deserve it without any doubt. But there is more to the story. It could be argued that many of them only go because they don't have any other choice of exchange program. Remember: Ciro had to fail applications on previous universities before getting into Polytech. Also, they don't get any Brazilian degree because ITA has no agreements with Polytechnique, and are therefore extremely likely to never come back. Not that Ciro thinks this is particularly bad for Brazil though, but it does make for a better deal for France overall as well. They also happen to have closer ties across cohorts of different years, and have managed to maintain a Google Doc with scanned past examinations (as of 2020 however, some/all of those examinations have been uploaded publicly, big kudos to them). Also almost all of them are software engineers, which is one of the few disciplines given at the relatively small ITA. This lack of diversity might not be ideal: if I were France, I would rather fish around all top Brazilian schools for "the best".
Besides the amazing funding/opportunities/alumni/staff loop which you can read about elsewhere, Polytechnique is amazing because you can choose what you will study every year to a very large extent.
This is in huge contrast to the crappy systems Ciro had seen e.g. in Brazil's Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, where students have to decide basically all their courses in huge packages, either at university entry (thus when they are completely clueless), or at a single point inside the university studies, changes being much harder.
Life quality was also amazing. Good free accommodation on campus and at the time a no-obligations scholarship for every foreign student great sport facilities. It seems that after Ciro left however more restrictions are added to the scholarships, what a shame! As of 2020 not everyone gets scholarships anymore it seems, mostly only loans that have to be paid back later. And those who are not poor have to pay Polytechnique scholarship fees on top of their living costs. And thus French austerity measures are undermining the greatest long term investment a country can possibly make: that of importing the very best students from other countries into yours. This after their host country has already spent 20 years raising and selecting them. And you won't even pay them 2 years of frugal existence to steal some of them them. Even if those students move away from your country later on, the contacts they made in your country mean they are much more likely to bring businesses over. But some will stay. Basically, France is becoming more like the United States.
This also makes it much more difficult for those students to do a PhD afterwards, where they would get paid very little, and are unable to pay their student debts. A PhD would be where they would possibly bring more of the next big thing to your country. Instead, they are much more likely to just go work for some big American company data wrangling and bring nothing to your country but their student debt dividends instead, which they will be pay to pay for in one year with those amazing salaries. And unsurprisingly many go to into banks. What a big time fail, France.
Sport was mandatory due to the military nature of the school. This did have the upside of getting students together more, although Ciro is against all forms of forced intellectual of physical activities for students. If you liked your sport it would be really cool though. But due to Section "Ciro Santilli's knee", he was forced to give up his first beloved choice which was soccer... life can be cruel. If only Ciro had known cycling at at the time, and if only that had been one of the sports you could choose (but of course it isn't, no school will want the bad reputation of when one of their students gets killed in a car accident).
There were also some useless "military exercises", or special situations in which you had to wear the useless school uniform as a formal "respect social clothing". Ciro Santilli is completely against all that meaningless bullshit, this his just a form of theatrical masturbation to nostalgically remember the good old days of Napoleon when France still ruled the world, and before they tortured the Algerians, see also: Video 4. "Gérard Fuchs interview from Ils racontent la Guerre d'Algérie (1982)". If you are going to do military-like stuff, then at least teach students how to shoot modern rifles and modern warfare tactics (which some of the French students actually do in the pre-school mandatory internship), and not this 18th century bullshit. Ciro favours of course the hoodie-wearing, "I only care about your abilities meritocracy" culture of Silicon Valley. And without the political correctness now associated with it in the 2020s. And no shooting people if possible.
During the time Ciro was at Polytechnique in early 2010's, the school was really isolated in the Plateau de Saclay, there were no shops in 10 minute walking distance! You either had to climb 300 steps to go down to the nearest village, Lozère, or take a bus to the nearest town, Massy. The fact that Times Higher Education ranked it as the second best university in the world in 2019 (archive) makes it good justice, given the small 500 student body. Things started to change a bit after Ciro left however, with the creation of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, which is bringing other schools to the Lozere area. This is for the best, as it might improve the global rankings of Polytechnique. Also it is a waste to have so few students at a technopole. But it will reduce the mystique of the place. You can't have everything in life.
Before 1976, Polytechnique was actually in the center of Paris at the Latin Quarter, so the Lozère mystique is not a traditional thing. But even when in Paris, students were in theory restricted to school grounds a most of the time. Although there are famous stories of a certain tree that could be used to climb the fence to go to Parisian parties when they couldn't stand it anymore. The tree was somewhat intentionally overlooked by school administrators. Polytechnique was drawn to Saclay no doubt because of the gravity of the CEA Paris-Saclay, France's analog to the United States Department of Energy national laboratories.
This made for some good memories though. The isolation favored concentration, and gave the place a mystical feeling. And then when you went to eat amazing Chinese food in Paris it just felt even more special and magic since you were so limited during the week. It was also under those magical circumstances in which Ciro met his wife, another student of the school, see also: Section "The main function of university is sexual selection".
Ciro also agonized about passing courses to get useless grades though! Polytechnique is hard for most Brazilians, specially if you select the more mathematics oriented courses, because the French students were math brainwashed for two years before joining.
Ciro's favorite spots/activities:
  • hide in top corner desk of the library to learn some science. Ciro loves libraries.
  • weekend days in his awesome room learning Chinese
    Figure 1. The room also has a bed and toilet, it was great, and it was free back in those days! Only the kitchen was shared, which is good for meeting people. And for getting your password keylogged in the shared supplies buying system. This actually happened while Ciro was at in Polytechnique, but the keylogger operator was caught, and the semi-secret-unknown-participants-Gestapo-like-but-mostly-head-of-school-approved student association "Khômiss" broke their door (which leads to an internal corridor) with a fire axe, their traditional way of saying that someone fucked up. All students live on campus, which is great for concentration.
  • sit next to the lake in a warm day to relax
    Figure 2. Just imagine this in a perfect sunny weekend day with pure silence, it was just perfect. The lake also has a long area where rowing is practiced.
  • randomly go study at night in one of the small 20 person classrooms that were used in the day and left open at night
    Figure 3.
    A typical small classroom at École Polytechnique
    . Source. The tables are shown in the usual course configuration. Imagine that at night, in pure silence, with some of your best friends studying on a nearby room. The usual course configuration was first a course by the main teacher in a large amphitheater, and then break down into small groups with tutors, known in French as "Petites classes" (PC). In some English-speaking world traditions, such small class system is known as recitation class. While those small classes are a reasonable approach, Ciro Santilli's slow brain would rather just have a book and an online forum where tutors answer questions instead.
Figure 4.
Horny Polytechnicienne mural by Binet BD
.
Edit: Ciro noticed this mural had been removed as of 2023. Of course it was removed! TODO removal date. TODO photo of the new art that took its place, it seems to be a boring image of R5-D4. Fucking political correctness zealots. A perfectly fine piece of erotica artwork lost forever except for this photo of it. Thanks to Ciro's kinky friend, Mr. F. for in his infinite insight insisting on taking a picture of it.
Every year, student organizations, the binets, get to compete for student elections, and they are allowed to make murals in the school to advertise themselves.
They kinky people from the 1996 Cartoon Binet (BD == Band Dessiné == Cartoon in French) decided to take it to the next level, with the depiction of a horny polytechnicienne, on the corridor near the student bar, the Bôbar, in front of the cartoon library of the Binet BD.
Good old 1996, this would never be allowed in 2019 due to political correctness.
As an engineering school, Polytechnique students were predominantly male up as of 2019.
Let's see how much longer it will last.
How about adding a sexy male polytechnicien suggestively holding his theatrical sword (nicknamed the "tangente") with shirt open instead of removing the lady???
In 2022, sexual aggression accusations at Polytechnique surfaced, will the mural survive them?
Ciro heard of two other mural censorship events orally from younger students during a visit in 2023:
Video 1.
Polytechnicienne by Ecole polytechnique
. Source.
Promotional documentary in French showing the situation of women at Polytechnique. Ciro couldn't resist putting it next to the horny polytechnicienne.
Of particular note is is the footage of the first year in which women were accepted, 1972: youtu.be/IA1kSC_d4R8?t=298, shortly before Polytechnique moved from central Paris to Lozère in 1976.
The fact that Ciro managed to find a wife in this conditions is a statement to his Brazilian seduction skills.
The following promotional videos give an idea of how the school looks like, although they fundamentally miss the little corners that Ciro really loved in that the place and which made it magic:
And a one second Ciro Santilli appearance from a 2016 video made during the annual Brazilian barbecue (or as close as you an get to it) which many ex-Brazilian students attend able: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndX_-A2Rjpo&t=189 wearing a Ring t-shirt.
Video 4.
Gérard Fuchs interview from Ils racontent la Guerre d'Algérie (1982)
Source.
French. Title translation: "they tell the story War in Algeria". In this segment at this timestamp, French politician and ancient Polytechnician tells of his experience in Algeria, to which all Polytechnicians were sent for 2 years after graduating as part of their mandatory service to the French state. He is not notable enough to have an English Wiki page however unfortunately.
He mentions that the huge scale military operations they did were useless, they enemies could easily notice and escape before they had closed in. He then chose a job in intelligence, the alternative being special operations, without fully knowing what it was going to be. He then once walked into his colleague during an interrogation where torture had obviously been used. He claims however that he managed to forbid torture under his command. He was then gravely shot, but survived.
He then mentions that when he came back and started digesting the experience, he felt that democracy was not enough, and that to actually stop wars people needed to be better informed and have a more direct democracy (a point Ciro Santilli agrees with), and that kind of made him want to become a politician. He looks like a nice guy.
On a related note, the exact same "Maquis"/"Maquisard" is used in French to describe both French WWII Resistance fighters, as well as the Algerian revolutionaries, as the south of France has a somewhat similiar dry bushy region where the revolutionaries would hide. And the French were like the Gestapo in Algeria.
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Molecular biology technologies Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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As of 2019, the silicon industry is ending, and molecular biology technology is one of the most promising and growing field of engineering.
Figure 1.
42 years of microprocessor trend data by Karl Rupp
. Source. Only transistor count increases, which also pushes core counts up. But what you gonna do when atomic limits are reached? The separation between two silicon atoms is 0.23nm and 2019 technology is at 5nm scale.
Such advances could one day lead to both biological super-AGI and immortality.
Ciro Santilli is especially excited about DNA-related technologies, because DNA is the centerpiece of biology, and it is programmable.
First, during the 2000's, the cost of DNA sequencing fell to about 1000 USD per genome in the end of the 2010's: Figure 2. "Cost per genome vs Moore's law from 2000 to 2019", largely due to "Illumina's" technology.
The medical consequences of this revolution are still trickling down towards medical applications of 2019, inevitably, but somewhat slowly due to tight privacy control of medical records.
Figure 2.
Cost per genome vs Moore's law from 2000 to 2019
. Source.
Ciro Santilli predicts that when the 100 dollar mark is reached, every person of the First world will have their genome sequenced, and then medical applications will be closer at hand than ever.
But even 100 dollars is not enough. Sequencing power is like computing power: humankind can never have enough. Sequencing is not a one per person thing. For example, as of 2019 tumors are already being sequenced to help understand and treat them, and scientists/doctors will sequence as many tumor cells as budget allows.
Then, in the 2010's, CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing started opening up the way to actually modifying the genome that we could now see through sequencing.
What's next?
Ciro believes that the next step in the revolution could be could be: de novo DNA synthesis.
This technology could be the key to the one of the ultimate dream of biologists: cheap programmable biology with push-button organism bootstrap!
Just imagine this: at the comfort of your own garage, you take some model organism of interest, maybe start humble with Escherichia coli. Then you modify its DNA to your liking, and upload it to a 3D printer sized machine on your workbench, which automatically synthesizes the DNA, and injects into a bootstrapped cell.
You then make experiments to check if the modified cell achieves your desired new properties, e.g. production of some protein, and if not reiterate, just like a software engineer.
Of course, even if we were able to do the bootstrap, the debugging process then becomes key, as visibility is the key limitation of biology, maybe we need other cheap technologies to come in at that point.
This a place point we see the beauty of evolution the brightest: evolution does not require observability. But it also implies that if your changes to the organism make it less fit, then your mutation will also likely be lost. This has to be one of the considerations done when designing your organism.
Other cool topic include:
It's weird, cells feel a lot like embedded systems: small, complex, hard to observe, and profound.
Ciro is sad that by the time he dies, humanity won't have understood the human brain, maybe not even a measly Escherichia coli... Heck, even key molecular biology events are not yet fully understood, see e.g. transcription regulation.
One of the most exciting aspects of molecular biology technologies is their relatively low entry cost, compared for example to other areas such as fusion energy and quantum computing.
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Nintendo 64 Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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This is the one that hit Ciro Santilli the hardest, coming in at the point in which he started to discern between games and the real world a little better. His parents bought it for him during a trip to Disney World in Florida in 1996 (?), since electronics were much cheaper in the USA.
So as Ciro became older, and turned into a software engineer, he started to become more and more morbidly curious about "N64 internals": tool-assisted speedrun, how the devkit looks like, how games were developed for it, hardware leaks, etc.
Luckily Ciro's mind is not interested enough by that useless shit for Ciro to seriously study it himself. But that's what YouTube is for, right? Why do useless stuff when other more useless people can do it for you?
The console has only 4 MB of RAM memory. It is quite incredible what can be done with 8 MB, from the point of view of a 2020 worls where 16 GB laptops are the norm.
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How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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This article gives an idea of how this kind of biological experiment feels like to a software engineer who has never done any biology like Ciro Santilli.
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Quantum circuits vs classical circuits Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Just like a classic programmer does not need to understand the intricacies of how transistors are implemented and CMOS semiconductors, the quantum programmer does not understand physical intricacies of the underlying physical implementation.
The main difference to keep in mind is that quantum computers cannot save and observe intermediate quantum state, so programming a quantum computer is basically like programming a combinatorial-like circuit with gates that operate on (qu)bits:
For this reason programming a quantum computer is much like programming a classical combinatorial circuit as you would do with SPICE, verilog-or-vhdl, in which you are basically describing a graph of gates that goes from the input to the output
For this reason, we can use the words "program" and "circuit" interchangeably to refer to a quantum program
Also remember that and there is no no clocks in combinatorial circuits because there are no registers to drive; and so there is no analogue of clock in the quantum system either,
Another consequence of this is that programming quantum computers does not look like programming the more "common" procedural programming languages such as C or Python, since those fundamentally rely on processor register / memory state all the time.
Quantum programmers can however use classic languages to help describe their quantum programs more easily, for example this is what happens in Qiskit, where you write a Python program that makes Qiskit library calls that describe the quantum program.
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Science is the reverse engineering of nature Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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How software engineers view science:
Science is the reverse engineering of nature.
Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.
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Students must be allowed to progress as fast as they want Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want.
They wait through school to get into university.
They wait through university to get to masters.
They wait through masters to get to PhD.
They wait through PhD to become a PI.
And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, they become fund proposal writers.
And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great.
So you just become software engineer or a consultant until you die.
Is this the society that we really want?
From True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen Chapter 2 "Roots":
John ([Bardeen].) and Bill ([his brother]) entered the combined seventh-eighth grade at "Uni High," Wisconsin's University High School, in the same year-John from third grade and William from fifth.
Established in September 1911, the school had been conceived as a laboratory for training high school instructors and for testing progressive ideas in education. In its philosophy and organization, Uni resembled the Dewey School. The students were accelerated as much as possible to keep lessons challenging. One goal was to "introduce pupils to high school methods and subjects before they reached the 9th grade." The fourth quarter, offered during the summer, allowed students who had missed work or had fallen behind to catch up. It also enabled the brightest students to complete senior high school in only three years
...
Even with the disruption of Althea’s death, John completed all his Uni High course work by age thirteen. But as he was "a little leery about graduating so young," he and Bill decided to attend Madison Central High School for two years, taking additional mathematics, science, and literature courses not offered at Uni. By the time John had turned fifteen and Bill seventeen, the two had completed every course of interest at Madison Central. There was no longer any reason to postpone entering college. In the fall of 1923 they both entered the freshman class at the University of Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, at the University of Oxford www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/21/highereducation.accesstouniversity Oxford to turn away child prodigies
We have been pushed to consider it, not because of concerns about whether it is psychologically healthy for children to study here, but because of child protection laws which have come into play this year for the first time.
FUUUUUUUCK. And so, in protecting children, we also rob them of their own future. But the official policy as of 2023 is unchanged at least in theory: uni-of-oxford.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/557/~/do-oxford-undergraduate-courses-have-a-minimum-age-requirement%3F Article also mentions Yinan Wang. Can't find his profiles now.
Bibliography:
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The best cycling map app Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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  • Google Maps download offline maps. This works very reliably, you can select the area you want to download. The only downside is that Google maps can't reliably show a route offline, and it does not contain national cycle route routes. Or those features are impossible for a software engineer to get working after trying for about 2 hours.
  • OpenStreetMap on browser with cycling layer: www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/49.582/1.934&layers=C This is the best visualization of cycling routes I've found so far, contains both National Cycle Network and National Byway and a few others, and they are shown extremely clearly. But as a website it doesn't reliably work offline
  • the OsmAnd app for Android is the best offline free-ish OpenStreetMap viewer I've found so far. You only have to pay after reaching 5 region downloads, and it is very cheap if you want to do so. The cycle route view is not amazing, the routes are not so clearly marked and mixed with very similarly colored big roads, but with a bit of effort you can make them out. No routing though
  • I've heard Komoot can keep a predefined route (possibly auto planed) reliably offline, but haven't used it myself. I was not able to see National Cycle Route clearly marked anywhere on it
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The Bibites Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Unknown real developer name, claims to be from Canada on YouTube channel about: www.youtube.com/@TheBibitesDigitalLife/about, likely because he's a software developer and wants to keep his employer's claws away from his side project.
Appears to be closed source unfortunately, so not suitable for research.
Video 1. "What will happen after 100h of evolution? by The Bibites (2022)" mentions it was started five years ago, so circa 2017.
Appears to be Unity-based, if you download and extract for Linux you get files named UnityPlayer.so.
Author is named Leo Caussan in game credits at startup: www.linkedin.com/in/l%C3%A9o-caussan-560350136/, a Canadian software engineer.
Was not very Linux compatible: www.reddit.com/r/TheBibites/comments/vqk6ac/program_stalls_at_a_blue_screen/ Trying to run 0.5.0 leads to a blank screen after you click "start simulation".
Video 1.
What will happen after 100h of evolution? by The Bibites (2022)
Source.
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The correlation between software engineers and Buddhism Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Ciro Santilli believes that there is a positive correlation between being a software engineer and liking Buddhist-like things.
Maybe it is linked to minimalism and DRY, which software engineers value so greatly.
Even Ciro had to try an unoriginal Buddhist joke intro in one of this Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro also feels that his "minimal reproducible example" scientific language/concept learning method obsession of breaking things into tiny sub-problems has a strong link with Koans.
Some notable Buddhism/programmer examples:
Another thing that points the correlation out is the existence of wattsalan.github.io/ on a github.io about Alan Watts.
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Try to fix your own bike before taking it to the shop Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
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Sometimes you get annoyed to death with your bike not breaking or changing gears perfectly as you would like, and the people at the bike shop never do the job well enough.
The problem with bike shops is that the employees are already swamped with work, and they don't get paid any extra for doing more work.
As a result, paradoxically, they are often happier, and respect you more if you are trying to get them to help you to fix your own bike!
Also, for the same reason, they don't have the time to go for a quick test ride after a fix to ensure that the bug was actually fixed.
So they ignore things that would obviously be huge ridability benefits (although they might not be obvious to newbie customers), for which customers would gladly pay more money for.
But you start to learn how to do stuff yourself and it feel amazing when you finally get there (after infinite trial and error).
Ciro dreams of a bike shop that actually calls you for the appointment and then teaches you how to fix the thing.
So the best strategy is to have a backup bicycle, and when your main one breaks, you just try to to the fix yourself. That means:
  • identifying the broken piece
  • watching YouTube videos of how to do the job
  • buying a replacement and any missing tools on Amazon
  • giving it a shot
Then, if you fail to do the fix, that is OK, just take it to the bike shop, with the piece you've bought, and ask them to do it for you. At least this way you did not waste a golden opportunity to learn!
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